Broken Hill NSW
Margaret Connell has been painting for 25 years Her painting are colourful ;inspired by such artists as Matisse the impressionists ,Vuillard and Bonnard and Van Gough. More recently by Wolf Khan. She paints scenery , still life and portrait images usually of women and children .
Artworks: 26
Margaret Connell has been interested in Art from childhood;spending her early years sketching doodling and always enthralled and looking at natures beauty .Her father encouraged her interest ,giving her Art books and taking her to the Art Gallery .
She started painting as a teenager but painted infrequently although she read widely Artists biographies and and loved looking at their paintings .She always enjoyed visiting Galleries.
It was rather late in life Margaret took weekend courses in painting .These short corses really stimulated a desire to be more involves in creating but work commitments prevented this for a while .A few years before retiring the situation improved.Work rosters enabled her to attend life drawing at the Art shed in Alice Springs and soon after she was able to attend Centralian Collage evening classes for drawing ,printmaking and later painting .Her painting took off and quite soon she had enough paintings for an Exhibition at Araluen Gallery
This first exhibition was called Faces from within .It was a show of colourful faces .These faces seem to have come from within her or from memory flowing onto to the canvas .It was difficult to know why she had the impulse to create these faces but having studied Piaget,s theory about language acquisition she concluded that humans have similar mental constructs that store acquired perceptions of visual stimuli and this is the source of memory of faces .For some reason Margaret has a drive to paint memories .
Margaret moved to Broken Hill in 2002 and attended TAFE to complete a diploma of Fine Arts . Soon after she studies for first year Fine Art Degree at Curtin University . More recently she has done courses with Art2Life on line and these have really stimulated her desire to paint as often as is possible .
Since starting to paint Margaret has participated in numerous group exhibitions and has had five solo exhibitions .Three of these were in Alice Springs and paintings were sold at all three .Some were purchased by European tourists .Centralian College acquired two of Margaret’s paintings
Margaret has had two exhibitions in Broken Hill and sold paintings at these .One of her paintings was accepted into The Out Back Art Prize at the Broken Hill Art gallery
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